Channing Tatum has revealed that learning to wrestle has taken a toll on his looks.

The 21 Jump Street star spent at least five months training to prepare for his role as a wrestler in Bennett Miller's dark drama Foxcatcher, the big-screen adaptation of Olympic wrestling gold medallist Mark Schultz's autobiography.

"We wrestled for about five or six months before. I think Mark and I both have cauliflower ear as take-home presents from that, and bad knees," the actor, who played Mark, admitted.

Foxcatcher, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is in competition for the Palme d'Or award, stars Steve Carell in a rare non-comic turn, as paranoid schizophrenic millionaire-turned-murderer John du Pont.

"None of it felt like an acting exercise," Steve said. "It was a different experience altogether and I credit Bennett for that."

The director explained: "It was so far outside of his comfort zone. I've never seen Steve do anything that would give any material evidence that he could do this. We just chatted and I heard how he thought and was thinking about the character, and I had a vision for it working."

Bennett, who previously directed Moneyball and Capote, added: "The style of this film and my other films is not so much telling a story as observing a story."

Foxcatcher will be released in the US in November, with a UK release date yet to be announced.